The present invention relates to an information asset management reporting technology for visualizing and reporting the whereabouts of information assets under management of an organization.
Information such as personal information or trade secrets in an organization has recently been increasingly computerized. The computerized information is provided as files on a computer or as data in a memory. Leakage of files containing such information frequently occurs, causing significant damage. In the following description, a file containing confidential information such as personal information or trade secrets will be referred to as an “information asset”. Since such information assets are files, they are easily duplicated, transferred, and processed and it is difficult to manage and determine their whereabouts (or locations). It is nearly impossible to determine usage of information assets such as how and by whom they are used. For example, it is very difficult to cope with accidental leaks such as leakage of information assets that were duplicated without the user's knowledge or leakage of information assets due to forgetting to delete them although they should be deleted according to the rules of the organization.
Outsourcing companies mostly conduct work using information assets received from customers. Outsourcing companies should delete information assets received from customers after the term of the outsourcing contract expires. Thus, it can be easily expected that outsourcing companies need to prove to customers that they have properly handled the information assets and also to delete the information assets without leakage after the term of the contract expires.
To deal with the risk of authorized users easily taking (or exporting) information assets or copies of information assets outside a network environment under management or a file management system (hereinafter referred to as a “network environment”), Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-518893 (Document 1) suggested a system that monitors and reports usage of information assets in the network environment to a manager, thereby easily detecting unexpected behavior patterns. With knowledge of where information assets under management of an organization are present, this system can detect, for example, whether or not any file has been sent as an email attachment, whether or not any file has been uploaded to a common storage region on the Internet, and whether or not any file has been written to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash memory or CD-Recordable (CD-R)/Digital Versatile Disk Recordable (DVD-R).
Google has introduced “Enterprise Solution” (URL:http://www.google.co.jp/enterprise/) (Document 2). To determine where information assets are present in a network environment, this system crawls files and indexes the contents of the files to find information assets at high speed. This system permits a user who desires to find an information asset to quickly locate the information asset simply by specifying a keyword.
According to a system disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2005-109779 (Document 3), to prevent an encrypted file from being decrypted at an arbitrary Personal Computer (PC), a dependent file for generating a decryption key is stored in specific PCs so that the decoding key can be generated only at the specific PCs which contain the dependent file. Even if information assets are exported to an arbitrary PC, this system prevents leakage of the information assets by preventing decryption of the information assets at the PC.